"Post-Music" Music Primer
Anybody that has listened to my (former) WTUL show, or ridden in the car with me, has usually found occassion to ask about how the hell I tell the difference between the various CDs I own that seem to mostly involve clicking and buzzing of various frequencies. My brother referred to it as "post-music", a title which I don't wholly reject. A lot of it is ambient, some of it not so much, but it all owes a debt to Brian Eno and Throbbing Gristle. I was thinking for today, since I can't think of much else to do, that I go thru a few of the artists that I think are most powerfully prescient in the genre my little brother dubbed "post-music". My initial plan was to put up some MP3s for yr sampling pleasure, but I don't think I'll do it all at once. We'll see. I haven't planned this yet. Onward, then, for as long as I feel like writing.
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Main - Motion Pool, 1994 (Beggars Banquet)
Buy it here.
I haven't heard much of Main's other work, but they descend from a metal outfit as far as I can tell. This is about as "musical", with one exception, as this stuff gets. They call their compositions (but with these guys you can actually call them "songs" without stretching too much from common usage) "drumless space". Consider these guys the Radiohead of post-music. They generally like to start with midrange droning static and build from there, but unlike a lot of these acts, they aren't afraid to use some actual guitars that sound like guitars, drums, and even audible and non-moaning vocals. For the uninitiated, this record is probably one of the more accesible in terms of being noisier than Sonic Youth but not nearly as academic as, say, LaMonte Young, or as abrasive as, say, Rubber O Cement. Not that I actually like Rubber O Cement, I'm just saying.
In any event, this record has got a lot of different looks, from the proto-industrial of "Core" and "Crater Scar' to the more ambient "Liquid Reflective". A fair amount of dub is buried under the static of this record, so if you find yourself ever reaching for a Pole record (who is iffy as far as meriting a mention here, he's almost too melodic) then you might like this Main record. I don't know if there's any truth in it, but I would be very surprised if Pole had never heard it.
I'm already exhausted, it's been a long week, so hopefully I'll continue this later, and put up some samples when I'm more feeling able.
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Main - Motion Pool, 1994 (Beggars Banquet)
Buy it here.
I haven't heard much of Main's other work, but they descend from a metal outfit as far as I can tell. This is about as "musical", with one exception, as this stuff gets. They call their compositions (but with these guys you can actually call them "songs" without stretching too much from common usage) "drumless space". Consider these guys the Radiohead of post-music. They generally like to start with midrange droning static and build from there, but unlike a lot of these acts, they aren't afraid to use some actual guitars that sound like guitars, drums, and even audible and non-moaning vocals. For the uninitiated, this record is probably one of the more accesible in terms of being noisier than Sonic Youth but not nearly as academic as, say, LaMonte Young, or as abrasive as, say, Rubber O Cement. Not that I actually like Rubber O Cement, I'm just saying.
In any event, this record has got a lot of different looks, from the proto-industrial of "Core" and "Crater Scar' to the more ambient "Liquid Reflective". A fair amount of dub is buried under the static of this record, so if you find yourself ever reaching for a Pole record (who is iffy as far as meriting a mention here, he's almost too melodic) then you might like this Main record. I don't know if there's any truth in it, but I would be very surprised if Pole had never heard it.
I'm already exhausted, it's been a long week, so hopefully I'll continue this later, and put up some samples when I'm more feeling able.
posted by P at 10:52 PM
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